How to Properly Flip 35mm Negative in DaVinci Resolve?

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Matt Filburn

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How to Properly Flip 35mm Negative in DaVinci Resolve?

PostTue Sep 28, 2021 1:58 pm

I've been working with Resolve for years but this one has me perplexed. Maybe I've been staring at it too long, hope someone can help.

I have a 35mm negative image I want to flip using Resolve. My goal is to do this without a plugin. There are a lot of tutorials about how to do it in Photoshop, but they don't seem to work the same in Resolve - something about how the curves operate, maybe in conjunction with nodes, that I don't understand.

I uploaded an example of the kind of .DNG I'm working with if someone wants to give it a shot:
https://we.tl/t-0Ej4YhjgwF

The "Invert" open FX feature is fine for flipping it from the orange-cast negative to the cyan-cast positive but getting a color accurate starting point from there is where I'm stuck.

Attachment: Example
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example.jpg
This to this? In resolve?
example.jpg (737.9 KiB) Viewed 1417 times
Last edited by Matt Filburn on Tue Sep 28, 2021 2:28 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Matt Filburn

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Re: How to Properly Flip 35mm Negative in DaVinci Resolve?

PostTue Sep 28, 2021 2:00 pm

Also - hopefully that made sense, but here's a few of those manual inversion of 35mm neg methods in Photoshop that I can't get to work in Resolve.

Manual Inversion of Color Negative Film


How to Edit Negative Scans and keep True Film Colours
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Sander de Regt

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Re: How to Properly Flip 35mm Negative in DaVinci Resolve?

PostTue Sep 28, 2021 3:02 pm

How was the negative scanned?
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Matt Filburn

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Re: How to Properly Flip 35mm Negative in DaVinci Resolve?

PostTue Sep 28, 2021 3:35 pm

They can come from a flatbed, a drum, or even straight off a highly controlled macro-equipped DSLR. They're raw DNGs and generally a high bitrate but the trick is I can't have them inverted automatically before I receive them (for instance, by common scanner software). What I've got to work with is the orange-cast negative.

Hoping there's something I can do natively in Resolve!
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waltervolpatto

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Re: How to Properly Flip 35mm Negative in DaVinci Resolve?

PostTue Sep 28, 2021 3:51 pm

that file seems compromised in scanning: I see hard clipping and a horribad cast....
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ReneRotterdam

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Re: How to Properly Flip 35mm Negative in DaVinci Resolve?

PostTue Sep 28, 2021 7:47 pm

Your negative has a strange red color cast, not even Agfa stock looked like that.
You might want to compare your scans with the actual stuff.
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James Little

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Re: How to Properly Flip 35mm Negative in DaVinci Resolve?

PostWed Sep 29, 2021 2:05 am

Not sure what the aim is, but the 'raw' data that is stored on disk is not inverted in anyway. Resolve does it for display for you. Probably best to check out the Cintel SDK example ProcessImage, as then you could skip some steps when processing the image, i.e. inversion stage/log stages and just display the original negative in linear or something.
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mattfezz

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Re: How to Properly Flip 35mm Negative in DaVinci Resolve?

PostWed Sep 29, 2021 3:03 am

Matt Filburn wrote:I have a 35mm negative image I want to flip using Resolve. My goal is to do this without a plugin. There are a lot of tutorials about how to do it in Photoshop, but they don't seem to work the same in Resolve - something about how the curves operate, maybe in conjunction with nodes, that I don't understand.


try turning the Lum mix to 0 and the curves will behave a bit more like photoshop
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